


“i don’t mind.”

by clickingkeyboards



Series: one hundred ways to say 'i love you' [55]
Category: Murder Most Unladylike Series - Robin Stevens
Genre: Hurt/Comfort, Memories, Sibling Bonding, Siblings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-25
Updated: 2019-12-25
Packaged: 2021-02-27 06:49:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,184
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22162825
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/clickingkeyboards/pseuds/clickingkeyboards
Summary: Bertie and Daisy finally clean out Fallingford, and discover some unwanted memories in Bertie's unchanged room.Canon EraWritten for the fifty-fifth prompt in the '100 ways to say "I love you"' prompt list by p0ck3tf0x on Tumblr.
Relationships: Bertie Wells & Daisy Wells
Series: one hundred ways to say 'i love you' [55]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1533164
Kudos: 22





	“i don’t mind.”

“We wish you a Merry Christmas! We wish you a Merry Christmas! We wish you a Merry—”

“FUCK OFF!” my brother screams out of the window.

In a discordant babble of unimpressed grumbles, the carol singers shuffle back down the driveway, their Christmas cheer dying in their throats.

“I hate carolers,” he says with a grumble as he pulls the third-floor front window shut. “Fuck them. We don’t want Christmas cheer.”

I suppose that we don’t. It’s Christmas Eve, and my brother and I have been forced by the government to clear out our family home after three years of it sitting unoccupied, as they want to make it a National Trust building as it is so 1800s in design. Both of our parents and all our other family members turned down the opportunity of having the house, leaving Bertie to gladly turn it over to the government and land us with the gargantuan task of clearing it out. As long as there is not a plaque on the wall that marks the spot my brother’s best friend poisoned our mother’s boyfriend, we are perfectly alright with it.

We took the train from Cambridge a week ago, and we have finally managed to get the heating running after a week of it grumbling in an especially un-co-operative way, trilling out a repetitive rattling noise that sounded suspiciously like ‘fuck you’.

“Do you mind being here for Christmas?”

_ Yes, _ I think.  _ I want my Hazel, I want George, I even want blasted Alexander Arcady. Anything but Fallingford, retracing memories of shouting at Hazel and hiding under tables and confronting Stephen Bampton for the final time. _

“I don’t mind, Squinty,” I tell him, patting his arm. 

“Onto… onto my room, then?” Bertie says stiffly.

“Alright, Squinty,” I tell him, squeezing his arm. “I’ll grab some more boxes from downstairs.”

The advantage to being in Fallingford with nobody else around is that I can slide down the bannisters.

For Christmas, we are supposed to be staying at Cambridge once again, just as we did two years ago. My best friend and I arrived there when Deepdean finished for the term, Hazel greeted with a deep kiss from her boyfriend and myself greeted with a kiss to my knuckles by one of my closest friends. Bertie and Harold came to meet us at the train station too, Bertie sweeping me into his arms in an enormous hug and hugging Hazel too, Harold kissing Hazel’s hand in a very grown-up way and leaning down to press a kiss to the top of my head. He is incredibly charming and chivalrous, and oddly familiar to me for a reason that I cannot quite place.

Earlier today, we called St. John’s to try and speak to our friends. However, we were only connected to Alfred Cheng, telling us that none of them were available.

I rush back up the stairs with several boxes to see Bertie standing in the doorway of his room. It’s still an upturned disaster from when we left, as nobody made his bed the morning he stormed from Fallingford and back to Eton for a hellish final term, the blankets half on the ground and the wardrobe doors wide open.

It is only then that I realise what he’s staring at: the other bed on the other side of the room is in an even worse state, with covers punched up at the foot of the bed and clothes spilling out of the dresser. Several school books are cast across the covers, the one on the top is a small volume of poetry, part of a set of two that the first one is missing from. Darned socks are strewn across the floor, along with threadbare shirts and too-short trousers with mismatched patches, and a pair of school shoes with the toes worn thin and the soles falling off. 

“It’s like he never left.”

“Bertie…” I lay my hand on his arm but Bertie shrugs me off, stepping further into the room.

“It’s like Stephen is still here. It’s like he’s just… just taken a walk down the hall, and will be back in just a moment. And in just a moment, he’ll— he’ll step into the room, and wrap his arms around me from behind, and tell me how he’ll never— how he’ll never let… let the murderer  _ hurt me _ .”

Bertie sinks to his knees with a wretched and awful sound, covering his face as harsh sobs forced from his throat, shaking his shoulders.

“BERTIE!” I cry, dropping to the ground and wrapping my arms around him.

I cannot help but be horrified. I never knew that Bertie was so affected, so close to Stephen. Who knew that boys could  _ have _ best friends? Hazel and I certainly did not. Even seeing George and Alexander at each other’s sides, gripping each other’s hand in the way Hazel and I do, sharing knowing looks and doing handshakes and whispering secrets, I thought that they were an oddity. No other boys seem to have a best friend, even Bertie. The only boy that he is close to is Harold, and even that seems to be haltingly awkward and stumbling, staring at each other and sharing looks filled with tension that I could snap if I reached out my hands.

How could he be so close to Stephen, and not tell me about it or be so open that I could notice? Even Hazel seems to be mistaken in her belief that Bertie can have a best friend, calling Harold a ‘godsend of a new best friend’ for my brother.

I pause. I realise.

“Bertie?” I say in a whisper, but he is already halfway to speaking.

“No, Squashy, let me talk.” His voice his rashing, painfully scratchy as it bubbles from his throat amongst the tail end of his sobs. “Imagine… you know you and Amina? Yes? Patch… patch that onto you and Hazel. Imagine that Hazel was your lover as well as your best friend. Now imagine that she murdered someone.”

I lock my arms around his neck in a tight embrace. “We can turn down the room, Squinty. Get up, you enormous lump. We can turn down the room and erase all of these awful memories.”

He lets out a shaking sigh. “May you do it?”

“I love you.”

_ Finally _ , he wraps his arms back around me with a sigh. “I love you, Squashy.”

I don’t know how long we sit there, wrapped into each other, inches away from the discarded belongings of the person who was certainly more than  _ something  _ to my brother. 

Downstairs, there is a knock on the door. Bertie gasps and says, “Who the fuck could that be?”

I shoot to my feet and run down the stairs while puts himself together. At the door, I fumble in the coat rack for a walking stick or an umbrella,  _ something  _ to hit a possible murderer or assaulter with. Then the letterbox is pushed inwards, slow and can be…

“Let us in, Daisy!” cries out Hazel through the gap. “We are dreadfully cold out here!”


End file.
